To Finish A Few Thoughts

There is a terrific crisis of health care, or the lack of health care, in America. There is lots of talk about it and I wrote about it after my hospital experience. There are millions of stories, virtually all of them bad. In business we look for the "root causes" of process issues, inefficiencies, failures of productivity, etc. One of the primary "root causes" of the crisis in American health care is right before our eyes most days. Remember those obese children I wrote about. Well they turn into the young adults who never had type II diabetes but now they do in record numbers. They turn into young adults with kidney failure, heart disease and other diseases of, at least, middle age. They don't exercise, they don't know how to eat and they are sicker than we have ever been. Diabetes is an epidemic. Unfortunately I have it. Some people think that it is never genetic, some people think it is. My grandfather and my father both developed mild type II in their late middle age. Mine came earlier and more severely but I have been overweight and they never were. My doctors at the time knew I was "pre-diabetic" but they did not counsel me, medicate me or otherwise suggest changes I could make to help avoid the development of the disease. I know that now. And now, unlike many, I can't "fix" it with diet. I can control it but not eliminate it. Some people can eliminate it, as they can mostly eliminate their obstructive sleep apnea with diet, exercise and sometimes medication. One problem is that doctors are very free with medication and don't really do much in the diet and exercise/education area. And most of us don't take the education all that seriously when it does come. So all this childhood obesity is leading us into a much worse crisis in healthcare than we already have. And the solution is in our own hands, and in our shopping carts.